Anastasia Tsioulcas

Anastasia Tsioulcas is a reporter for NPR Music. She reports on a wide range of musical genres and music-industry topics for NPR's flagship news programs, as well as for NPR Music.

Tsioulcas is intensely interested in the arts at the intersection of culture, politics, economics and identity. She has profiled musicians and dancers in contemporary Cuba, a punk drummer from Washington, DC who raced to preserve the artistic traditions of pre-civil war Syria, a band of Muslim and Jewish musicians from Algeria reunited after 50 years, and an interfaith group from Texas rooted in a 700-year-old singing tradition from south Asia. She has also brought listeners into the creative process of musicians like composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

As a video producer, she has created some of NPR Music's high-profile music documentaries and performances, including bringing cellist Yo-Yo Ma to a Brooklyn theatrical props warehouse and pianist Yuja Wang to an icy-cold Steinway & Sons piano factory in Queens. Tsioulcas also produces some of the episodes in NPR Music's much-lauded Tiny Desk Concert series, and has hosted live concerts from venues like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York's (Le) Poisson Rouge. She has also commissioned and produced several world premieres on behalf of NPR Music, including a live event that brought together 350 musicians on the steps of the Brooklyn Public Library.

Tsioulcas has reported from across Europe, north and west Africa, south Asia and Cuba for NPR and other outlets. Prior to joining NPR in 2011, she was widely published as a writer and critic on both classical and world music, and was the North America editor for Gramophone Magazine and the classical music columnist for Billboard.

Born in Boston, Tsioulcas was trained from an early age as a classical violinist and violist. She holds a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University in comparative religion.

Two additional women, violinists Emilia Mettenbrink and Raffaela Kalmar, have made allegations of sexual misconduct against violinist William Preucil, the concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra and a now-former instructor at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM). Their accusations were printed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Sunday.

R. Kelly's ex-wife, Andrea Kelly, has now accused the R&B singer of multiple incidents of physical abuse. The woman, who was married to R. Kelly from 1996 to 2009, made her allegations on an episode of the ABC talk show The Viewlast Thursday.

Orri Páll Dýrason, drummer for the popular Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós since 1999, has resigned from the group in the wake of allegations of rape made by a woman in Los Angeles named Meagan Boyd. In her accusation, made late last week via two Instagram posts that have since been deleted, Boyd alleges that the two met in January 2013 at a club where she worked at the time, and that he raped her at his apartment twice on the night they met.

The New York Philharmonic announced Sunday that it has taken action against two prominent musicians over unspecified "misconduct": the orchestra's principal oboist, Liang Wang, and its associate principal trumpeter, Matthew Muckey.

The orchestra said the decision came after a five-month internal investigation, led by a former federal judge. Both musicians dispute the Philharmonic's findings, and while the musicians' union reviews the orchestra's decision, the two have been placed on unpaid leave.

Mac Miller, the Pittsburgh-born rapper who developed a ravenous following over the course of five successful albums, died Friday of an apparent overdose in his Los Angeles home, multiple outlets have reported. He was 26 years old.

On Thursday night, the rapper Nas posted a sprawling open letter to his ex-wife on Instagram in which he denied the allegations of physical and mental abuse that she publicly made against him in April.